Research

When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners?

High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism

Hankinson, Michael

Forthcoming, American Political Science Rview

How does spatial scale affect support for public policy? Does supporting housing citywide but ``Not In My Back Yard'' (NIMBY) help explain why housing has become increasingly difficult to build in once affordable cities? I use two original surveys to measure how support for new housing varies between the city-scale and neighborhood-scale. Together, an exit poll of 1,660 voters during the 2015 San Francisco election and a national survey of over 3,000 respondents provide the first empirical measurements of NIMBYism at the individual-level. While homeowners are sensitive to housing's proximity, renters typically do not express NIMBYism. However, in high-rent cities, renters demonstrate NIMBYism on par with homeowners, despite continuing to support large increases in the housing supply citywide. These scale-dependent preferences not only help explain the deepening affordability crisis, but show how institutions can undersupply even widely supported public goods. When preferences are scale-dependent, the scale of decision making matters.

Racial and Spatial Targeting

Segregation and Subprime Lending within and across Metropolitan Areas

Hwang, Jackelyn, Michael Hankinson, and K. Steven Brown

Social Forces, 2015

Recent studies find that high levels of black-white segregation increased rates of
foreclosures and subprime lending across US metropolitan areas during the housing
crisis. These studies speculate that segregation created distinct geographic
markets that enabled subprime lenders and brokers to leverage the spatial proximity of
minorities to disproportionately target minority neighborhoods. Yet, the studies do not
explicitly test whether the concentration of subprime loans in minority neighborhoods
varied by segregation levels. We address this shortcoming by integrating
neighborhood-level data and spatial measures of segregation to examine the relationship between
segregation and subprime lending across the 100 largest US metropolitan areas.

Can Powerless Institutions Derail Collective Action?

Neighborhood Planning Institutions & Citywide Housing Supply

Hankinson, Michael

Working Paper

This paper leverages historical housing permitting data in 52 cities from 1960 to 2010 to measure the effect of neighborhood advisory boards, citizen groups that review new development proposals but lack any formal veto powers. Using a difference-in-differences model, I find that the implementation of a neighborhood board leads to a 35 percent decrease in annual housing permitting citywide. This dramatic decline demonstrates how the creation of even a formally powerless, small-scale institution substantially affects policy outcomes citywide.

Neighborhood Stability and Civic Participation

Using 311 Data

Working Paper

The relationship between residential stability and non-voting participation has been largely ignored in the study of context. Using individual-level reports on every 311 call for city services and a panel of individual-level, geocoded and personally identified, census data from a mid-sized northeastern U.S. city, we explore the relationship between the residential stability of neighborhoods and civic participation. We use individual census records to construct annual measures of residential churn, and its ethnic composition, at various levels of spatial aggregation. We then examine the correlation between churn and 311 calls in neighborhoods over time, as well as the causal effect of churn on a panel of individual 311 users observed over several years. We find that the composition of residential churn, rather than the quantity of new residents, has implications for local citizen engagement via 311.

Externalities or Extortion?

Privatizing Social Policy through Community Benefits Agreements

Hankinson, Michael

Harvard Journal of Real Estate, 2013

Like any political process, permit approval consists of negotiating, bargaining,
and promise making, actions inherently based on an ethics of trust and transparency. Recently,
bargaining innovations have sought to lessen the role of government as a mediator between developers
and community groups, potentially increasing the risk of violations of trust and transparency. In
this article, I analyze these bargaining innovations to understand how investors, community
advocates, and concerned citizens can better navigate the ethical risks of the development process.

About Me

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow of Quantitative Policy Analysis in the Department of Politics at Oberlin College. In May 2017, I graduated with a Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy from Harvard University, a joint program between the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the Kennedy School of Government. My research grapples with the effect of scale on democracy. How should we decide where to put things that society needs, but nobody wants nearby? In Fall 2018, I will join the faculty of Baruch College, CUNY as Assistant Professor of Political Science with a focus in Public Policy.